Unconscious Bias

The following “training” has been offered at work.

Overview

Unconscious Bias: Understanding the SEEDS of Bias

Unconscious Bias will helps all employees enhance awareness of their bias in order to make better people decisions which in turn will enable the company to build and maintain a more inclusive environment. Program objectives:

·         Promote inclusion by mitigating bias in everyday interactions

·         Learn to identify certain types of bias/leverage the right mitigation strategy

·         Significantly reduce bias in important decisions about people and resources

How You Will Benefit

Understanding the SEEDS of Bias will enable you to understand the complexities of unconscious bias and learn techniques to mitigate and prevent bias and make better decisions. With that understanding in mind, you will be able to contribute to make more informed, effective and confident decisions because you will understand and remove bias from your decision making processes.

Course Specifics

The Unconscious Bias program covers three content areas:

1. Brains are Biased
2. The SEEDS Model
3. Mitigating Bias

The program puts research into practice to promote effective conversations and brain-friendly learning to raise awareness and change behavior.

Who Should Attend

Unconscious Bias: Understanding the SEEDS of Bias is designed for all employees. It is also part of the Management Fundamentals curriculum for new managers.

Call me cynical, but this sounds absolutely awful (and, dare I say it, very “American”) so I have absolutely no intentions of attending.  But then the last sentence threw me – my only current form of career advancement is, reluctantly, to become a manager, thereby implying that I should attend this training.  What a dilemma.  I probably won’t attend – mainly because I don’t think I need the training.  It is the Chinese/Indian members of my group who are the ones who need to attend, since I am the one in the minority and the victim of bias.  And I have absolutely no expectations that regardless of whatever training they might attend their behavior will not improve my status and standing in my group, regardless of my ability.  Yes, I am saying that I am a victim of racial discrimination in the workplace, intentionally or unintentionally.  Yikes, that sounds like a bigger deal than maybe I intended. Regardless, I bet I could cause a big stink if I was to bring this up with HR.